Ruminate

A good piece in the Guardian about Tristram Shandy, one of the best novels too many people have not read, and why it’s more fun to read than ever. There are a number of web versions available. TS, written in the mid 1700s, is a book made for the web in both style and history.

Lost in all the brouhaha about Laura Miller’s motives/karma/intentions with her scathing, but superficial, review of Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book, Diary, is the fact that the novel just isn’t very good. Not as bad as Choke, but in no way compelling or worthy of half the ink and bad-blood that is being spilled. Palahniuk looks to this reader like a magician with only one trick– he’s found a kind of voice he likes and he thinks that’s all there is to it– who is heading straight for retirement. It’s unfair to expect him to do something completely new with every book– doing it once, as he has, is enough. But he needs to do something different from what he has already done! That’s not asking too much.

I do find it rather incredible that so many of those who disagree take up the “then why is he so popular” argument. Unless they are willing to stand and hold hands with Kenny G, Tom Clancy, Thomas Kinkade, and the rest, then they really should let that whole line of reasoning go.

Essential texts appear to be coming into vogue in poetry blogland. I’ll have to give the idea of essential poetic texts some sustained thought, which is obviously not my forte as of late. But here is a spontaneous list of volumes I’d want to save first if my house were burning. You’ll quickly see that my selection criteria is purely one of personal importance, sometimes for reasons completely outside the text. Later I’ll think specfically about poetics. Onward:

• The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano
• Collected Poems by James Wright
• Will You Please be Quiet Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Ray Carver
• All Of Us: The Collected Poems by Ray Carver
• Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
• The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Elemental Odes by Pablo Neruda
• Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
• Metamagical Themas and Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstader
• The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
• Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida
• Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
• Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Collected Poems of Roethke

I could go on for at leat 100 more. But where’s the focus? Where are the women? Tender Buttons and Dickinson have to make it in there, to start. That’s the problem with this listmaking, and why others are doing it much more effectively than I am. I’ll take another, more focused shot later.

I’m glad people are happy with the selection of Louise Gluck as our next national Poet Laureate. I have to admit that while I’m sure I’ve read some of her work, none of it has stuck with me. I’m not real impressed with what I’ve found on the web. I am more surprised surprised at the generally warm reception she is getting in some of the poetry weblogs, considering that her work seems obviously representative of the maligned School of Quietude.

By all accounts she is deserving, a hard working writer who doesn’t seek the limelight. These are good things, right? I’m just not sure how much they’ll help her in what is essentially a public relations position.

I guess at the very least, a whole bunch of people will learn to pronounce her last name correctly.

We rummage through pictures and I try to assign dates to them. Most might as well belong to a stranger. I can’t explain how it is that one year can run into another without mercy, rivers merging from a vaguely remembered headwater to chase an uncertain end. But you hold up each picture like a specimen and ask When was this? When was this? I’m ashamed. I’m not even sure about some of the baby pictures… which is you and which is your brother? Who are those strangers holding you? You want to attach history to the images, the Gulf War or asteroids bruising the face of Jupiter. I tell you to think bigger. Go back to landing on the moon. The Inquisition. That ripe hanging apple and the thunderous spark from God’s finger. Anything before my receding figure, the taste of your mother still on my lips.

• There’s something wrong when the most exciting event in my life is discovering the convenience of crock pot cookery. What’s next… fondue? Macrame pot-holders?
• I have a longstanding affection for Arnold that won’t go away no matter how bad the movies get, how far right he turns, or how ridiculous his candidacy becomes. In my mid-late teens I was obsessed with bodybuilding, in general, and Ahnuld in particular. In his prime he had one of the most perfectly proportioned bodies I’ve ever seen, male or female. Modern bodybuilding has become disgustingly disproportionate and turned completely away from classical form. Young Arnold was something to behold, especially in his trademark 3/4 twist pose. Even this many years later I can’t quite let go of those times. I’m glad I don’t vote in California.
• I have a long way to go before reaching even the first step on the Eightfold Path.

People who spend time seriously worrying over what tradition, school, or group they fit into– or what banner they labor under– get boring pretty quickly, don’t they? Most of the generally good poetry weblogs seem to be going in that direction lately.

All that hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and other mental gesticulating over who is or isn’t really a bruised New Brutalist, a card carrying langpo practitioner, a dutiful acolyte of the School of Quietude, an itching leader of the avant garde, or a dadburned, newfangled experimentalist! I guess as the labels come and go (speaking of those they think they know) they provide grist for the insider-joke mill and the often brilliant Jim Behrle cartoon… but trying to create a productive conversation inside these tiny boxes– in the dispersed group of poets in their blogs– is like rowing a boat with a one-inch rod. There’s a lot of flailing and muttering but not a lot of motion. I was going to say “bailing with a colander” but I don’t think the poetry ship is going down quite yet. And that would just be silly.

In fairness, I should note that I have found a lot of Ron Silliman’s recent writing of interest, particularly the “Essential Reading” entries that he partially deplores. In fact, the “JOE / JOE” discussion is part of his discussion of a Robert Grenier book that I am still interested in seeing, despite the hot-air Silliman has puffed into the hype balloon around that trivial entry.

Today is Lester Young’s birthday. For the uninitiated, I recommend either Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio or the Aladdin recordings (post-war). Really, anything before the war years is good, it is only the later recordings that things become a bit uneven– and even then Young remains a better performer than almost anyone else in jazz.

Laurable posted a link to Al Young reading “Lester Leaps In”

And here is a poem by William Matthews from the unfortunately OOP Rising and Falling (full text of the book is available in the CAPA archive):

Listening to Lester Young

for Reg Saner

It’s 1958. Lester Young minces
out, spraddle-legged as if pain
were something he could step over
by raising his groin, and begins
to play. Soon he’ll be dead.
It’s all tone now and tome
slurring toward the center
of each note. The edges that used to be
exactly ragged as deckle
are already dead. His embouchure
is wobbly and he’s so tired
from dying he quotes himself,
easy to remember the fingering.

It’s 1958 and a jazz writer is coming home
from skating in Central Park. Who’s that
ahead? It’s Lester Young! Hey Pres,
he shouts and waves, letting his skates
clatter. You dropped your shit, Pres says.

It’s 1976 and I’m listening
to Lester Young through stereo equipment
so good I can hear his breath rasp,
water from a dry pond –,

its bottom etched, like a palm,
with strange marks, a language
that was never born
and in which palmists therefore
can easily read the future.

You tell ‘em!

         JOE
         JOE

My ass.

UPDATE

Ron goes on and on in defense of the JoeJoe poem. I don’t think so, Ron. The poem is about as interesting as the exhibition of the blank, primered canvas, or Cage’s 4′33″ — it’s a small, shallow joke, perhaps funny at one particular moment in one particular circumstance, but otherwise completely without weight or serious merit… except as a conversational pivot for which just about any text will do. Of course, by Ron’s logic, any protest against any art which he views as misunderstood can be defended by relating it to other art which has been misunderstood. So JoeJoe is vindicated because Pollock was misunderstood. Similarly, this new poem I just wrote: “No / Title” is vindicated because no one really “got” John Coltrane at first either.

What you are seeing in the Silliman defense (perhaps we should start naming these rhetorical tactics as they do chess openings and strategies) is nothing of the poem and a whole lot of Ron listening to Ron talk. Which makes me think: who cares? Where’d the poem go?